Aretha Teckentrup

“You get to a point where there’s not that many people in the world working on what you’re working on.”

Dr. Aretha Teckentrup is a lecturer in the Mathematics of Data Science who received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Bath. In our interview with her, she discusses the road that led her to where she is today, her research pursuits and what a life in academia may look like for any aspiring academics.

Many people at the beginning of their academic journey have experienced a state of anxiety or uncertainty regarding future career paths. One potential and, at times, intimidating prospect is a future in academia. For Dr. Teckentrup, maths felt natural; that’s why she entered the field in the first place. What propelled her to continue and obtain her master’s degree was the need to learn more. “In the first and second year of an undergraduate degree,” she says, “you’re kind of building the foundation to everything. Once you’ve got the basics, that’s when you go on to do more complicated things. It was in the third and fourth year that I felt like I was doing interesting stuff and I wanted to learn more. That’s how I ended up doing a PhD.”

After her PhD, Dr. Teckentrup continued in academia. “In the typical academic life after the PhD,” she explains, “you do a couple of short posts before you get a lecturer position. The posts are focused on research, just to let you become better-rounded as a researcher before you get into your permanent position.” One that Dr. Teckentrup had was working in Florida. When asked about differences in the field between the US and the UK, she notes that, “Academia is quite international anyway. You get to a point where there’s not that many people in the world working on what you’re working on. You have collaborators all over the world.”

Her current work is focused on problems related to data science; one example is her development of numerical methods for weather predictions. She explains that there is a mathematical equation, coming from physical laws, which governs how the atmosphere evolves. The equation is complicated so it has to be solved numerically rather than analytically. “What you really have to do,” she says, “is you have to take that model that you have – those equations you have for the atmosphere – and combine it with the observational data. That is something that is becoming more and more important in a lot of areas – combining the mathematical models that you have with the data.” To get the most accurate predictions, you have to use all of the information you have, and this information can come from very different sources such as mathematical models and real world data. Dr. Teckentrup further highlights this by explaining, “Things are traditionally being done separately. There are a lot of people working on data analysis and statistics, and then there’s the mathematicians that have been working on the modelling and the solution of the equations. Trying to combine them, well I think there’s still a lot of questions there and that’s something I’m very interested in.”

Another interesting insight Dr. Teckentrup shares with us is how data has changed over time. “In the last decade,” she says, “the amount of data that we have has increased very rapidly, mostly because of technology.” She explains that we have the means to gather data and measurements about different things, and that there’s a lot of information coming from us using social media. For example, the pictures posted on Instagram can be used to gain insight into travel patterns. “You really need to learn how to use that data to get the information you want,” she tells us.

Dr. Teckentrup mentions receiving the SIAG/UQ Early Career Prize from SIAM – the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The society is based in the US, but is international, and she describes it as a community for researchers from academia and industry. “It sets up activity groups where you can just join and talk to people doing similar work,” says Dr. Teckentrup, “It publishes journals and sets up conferences; things like that.” The prize recognises an early career researcher for outstanding research contributions in the field of uncertainty quantification, and gave her the opportunity to present her work in front of an audience of 600 colleagues at the main conference in her field.

It seems like a life in academia, at least for Dr. Teckentrup, is a happy and fulfilling one. She’s been interested in what she works in, and her projects are interesting and cutting-edge. Does this take away from the aforementioned intimidation factor? A little bit. Does it make it less exciting? Quite the opposite.